Today, TED is thrilled to announce the 25 new members of 2012’s TED Fellows class and 12 new Senior Fellows. A Lebanese open-source hardware inventor, a French computational architect and the founder of Skillshare.com are among 25 members of 2012’s class of new TED Fellows. Twelve new Senior Fellows from seven countries, selected for two more years in the program, include a Yemeni anti-censorship software designer, an Ethiopian-American recording artist, a Venezuelan culture curator and a computer scientist creating self-assembling machines.

(The full list of TED Fellows and TED Senior Fellows follows after the jump.)

“We are tremendously proud to announce this year’s class of TED Fellows, which includes 25 amazing cross-disciplinary innovators from around the world,” said Tom Rielly, the director of the TED Fellows program. “The generous and collaborative spirit of the TED Fellows, and the global nature of much of their work, allow them to find surprising and ingenious solutions to many of the world’s biggest problems. From struggling to fight disease, to engineering a sustainable future or saving our environment, to expanding human potential, this group of Fellows promises to make an impact for generations to come.”

This year’s Fellows hail from eleven different countries, including Ireland, Lebanon, Korea, Kenya and Uganda. The group includes Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona state senator, human rights activist and LGBT political leader; it also includes Sarah Parcak, an archaeologist who uses high-resolution and NASA satellite imagery to discover new archaeological sites in Egypt; and Greg Gage, a DIY neuroscientist and co-founder of Backyard Brains, an organization teaching secondary school kids neuroscience through experiments with robotic control of ordinary cockroaches.

The full list:

TED2012 Fellows:

Ayah Bdeir (Lebanon | US) — Engineer + artist
Lebanese artist, inventor and founder of littleBits, an open-source system of pre-assembled circuits that snap together with magnets — making learning about electronics fun, easy and creative.

Laurel Braitman (US) — Science historian + writer
American historian and anthropologist of science studying the mental health of animals and what it means about humans. Her research, subject of her upcoming book Animal Madness, posits that animals suffer from mental illness too.

Asha de Vos (Sri Lanka) — Blue whale scientist
Sri Lankan cetologist, oceanographer and Ph.D. student studying a unique population of non-migrating blue whales found only in the Northern Indian Ocean.

Zena el Khalil (Lebanon) — Artist + writer + cultural activist
Lebanese interdisciplinary artist building bridges through glitter, faith and compassion. A blogger and publisher, she is also the author of Beirut, I Love You: A Memoir.

Michael Karnjanaprakorn (US) — Entrepreneurial educator
Co-founder of Skillshare, a community marketplace to learn anything from anyone, leading to the democratization of teaching.

Jimmy Lin (US) — Computational geneticist
Geneticist and founder of the Rare Genomics Institute, an organization that allows patients to crowdsource funds and genomes to accelerate research of their rare genetic diseases.

Christine Marie (US) — Shadow artist
American artist specializing in creating, directing and choreographing performances inspired by the ancient form of Balinese shadow art, all with live cinematic and 3D stereoscopic effects.

Lucy McRae (Australia | Netherlands) — Body architect
Australian artist and “body architect” straddles the worlds of fashion, technology and the body to create unusual forms around the human body.

Oliver Medvedik (US) — Molecular biologist
Open-source synthetic biologist and co-founder of Genspace, a first-of-its-kind community biolab. He believes that synthetic biology and biotech education be made low-cost and accessible to all.

Alex Odundo (Kenya) — Agricultural machinist
Kenyan agricultural machinist and inventor of the Sisal Decorticator, a machine turning raw sisal into fiber, and the Sisal Twiner, a machine turning the fiber into rope, which customers sell for income.

Damian Palin (Ireland | Singapore) — Bio-mineralogist
Irish research engineer based in Singapore, developing a process that seeks to employ bacteria to biologically mine minerals out of the brine left over from the desalinization process.

Bre Pettis (US) — Maker
Inventor, maker and founder of MakerBot Industries, a company producing the Thing-O-Matic, the first affordable 3D printer.

Sarah Parcak (US) — Space archaeologist
Archaeologist who uses high-resolution and NASA satellite imagery to discover new archaeological sites and “long-lost” cities in the pyramid fields, Nile Valley and Delta of Egypt, most of which remain undetected and unexcavated.

Myshkin Ingawale (India) — Medical device innovator
Indian founder of BIosense Technologies, a low-cost medical device company that has created a device that tests for anemia in pregnant women without drawing blood, using only light.

Christina Warriner (US | Switzerland) — Archaeogeneticist
American archaeogeneticist studying the plaque on mummies’ teeth to determine how the human species evolved, including diet, diseases, environmental stressors and more.

Abigail Washburn (US | China) — Singer + banjo player + cultural activist
Singer, songwriter, clawhammer banjo player and recording artist who tours the world performing in both English and Chinese. Preparing to study law and settle in Beijing, she left to sing and play.

Meklit Hadero (Ethiopia | US) — Singer + songwriter
Ethopian American singer, songwriter and recording artist working on bridging the Ethiopian diaspora living in the United States with Ethiopians in Ethiopia, through her organization the Arba Minch Collective.

Teru Kuwayama (US | Afghanistan) — Crisis photographer
American photojournalist covering humanitarian crises in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir and Iraq, and founder of Basetrack, an open-source embedded media project that changes the relationship between war news and the families of soldiers.

The TED Fellows program is excited to announce the new group of TED2018 Fellows and Senior Fellows. Representing a wide range of disciplines and countries — including, for the first time in the program, Syria, Thailand and Ukraine — this year’s TED Fellows are rising stars in their fields, each with a bold, original approach […]